In Yugoslav tribunal, welling up of conscience

If Mr. Karadzic, facing the court Friday, feels such remorse, it did not register in a four-page letter he wrote on July 31 and sent to the tribunal just days after his capture. The letter stated that he had been promised immunity in a secret deal with Clinton White House envoy Richard Holbrooke, and that his arrest is illegal. The former Bosnian Serb president is expected to defend himself.

The cooperation of Biljana Plavsic, the No. 2 Bosnian Serb political authority under Karadzic, may be of real significance in his trial. Ms. Plavsic pleaded guilty in 2002 of responsibility in thousands of deaths over five years. She told the court, "I have now come to the belief and accept the fact that many thousands of innocent people were the victims of an organized, systematic effort to remove Muslims and Croats from the territory claimed by Serbs. By the end, it was said, even among our own people, that in this war we had lost our nobility of character. The obvious question becomes, 'If this truth is now self-evident, why did I not see it earlier?' "

Kelly Askin of the Open Society Justice Initiative in New York, and other court officials, say that testimony by Plavsic will be admissible. But with rumors swirling over whether Plavsic is renouncing her plea of guilt, it is questionable whether she will testify against her former boss.

During the Plavsic trial, one expert witness, Alex Boraine, who had served as head of the Methodist Church in South Africa and been part of that country's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, told the court that the kind of accountability brought through confessions are crucial for a society to recover after war.

"If accountability is not present, then the reconciliation would be a contradiction in terms. I think systems of criminal justice exist not simply to determine guilt or innocence, but also to contribute to a safe and peaceful society."

Often, those who plead guilty know that others have committed worse acts. One Hague staffer who investigated a midlevel officer accused of war crimes began to realize that other officers were more guilty. "You began to see that a lot of the question about who came to the Hague was local politics," said the staffer. "Yes, those indicted may have had a good case against them. But you could see there were three or four around them [who were] zealots, more responsible."

Journalist Mirko Klarin, who has covered the tribunal daily for more than a decade, said he began to conceive a film after watching Goran Jelisic, the self-proclaimed "Serbian Adolf" who ran the Luka detention camp near Brcko. Mr. Jeliscic did not make a confession; he pleaded guilty. But he was already notorious in the region. "The power of this man standing up 31 times and saying I'm guilty ... even if he denied the genocide charge, was something that went past my ability to write," says Mr. Klarin. "It was incredibly powerful, and I realized this story should be told as a documentary ... people needed to see this. Words weren't enough."

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